Parkman Vol. 4, Chapter 16

The governor, the intendant, and the supreme council or court, were absolute masters of Canada under the pleasure of the king.

Our special project presenting the definitive account of France in Canada by Francis Parkman, one of America’s greatest historians.

Previously in The Old Regime In Canada. Continuing chapter 15

The king, dispenser of charity for all Canada, came promptly to the rescue. He granted an alms of a hundred crowns to each family, coupled with a warning to the recipients of his bounty that “their misery proceeds from their ambition to live as persons of quality and without labor.” [1] At the same time, the minister announced that no more letters of nobility would be granted in Canada; adding, “to relieve the country of some of the children of those who are really noble, I send you (the governor) six commissions of Gardes de la Marine, and recommend you to take care not to give them to any who are not actually gentilshommes.” The Garde de la Marine answered to the midshipman of the English or American service. As the six commissions could bring little relief to the crowd of needy youths, it was further ordained that sons of nobles or persons living as such should be enrolled into companies at eight sous a day for those who should best conduct themselves, and six sous a day for the others. Nobles in Canada were also permitted to trade, even at retail, without derogating from their rank. [2]

[1: Abstract of Denonville’s Letters, and of the Minister’s Answers, in N. Y. Colonial Docs., IX. 317, 318.]

[2: Lettre de Meules au Ministre, 1685.]

They had already assumed this right, without waiting for the royal license; but thus far it had profited them little. The gentilhomme was not a good shopkeeper, nor, as a rule, was the shop-keeper’s vocation very lucrative in Canada. The domestic trade of the colony was small; and all trade was exposed to such vicissitudes from the intervention of intendants, ministers, and councils, that at one time it was almost banished. At best, it was carried on under conditions auspicious to a favored few and withering to the rest. Even when most willing to work, the position of the gentilhomme was a painful one. Unless he could gain a post under the Crown, which was rarely the case, he was as complete a political cipher as the meanest habitant. His rents were practically nothing, and he had no capital to improve his seigniorial estate. By a peasant’s work he could gain a peasant’s living, and this was all. The prospect was not inspiring. His long initiation of misery was the natural result of his position and surroundings; and it is no matter of wonder that he threw himself into the only field of action which in time of peace was open to him. It was trade, but trade seasoned by adventure and ennobled by danger; defiant of edict and ordinance, outlawed, conducted in arms among forests and savages, — in short, it was the Western fur trade. The tyro was likely to fail in it at first, but time and experience formed him to the work. On the Great Lakes, in the wastes of the Northwest, on the Mississippi and the plains beyond, we find the roving gentilhomme, chief of a gang of bushrangers, often his own habitants; sometimes proscribed by the government, sometimes leagued in contraband traffic with its highest officials, a hardy vidette of civilization, tracing unknown streams, piercing unknown forests, trading, fighting, negotiating, and building forts. Again we find him on the shores of Acadia or Maine, surrounded by Indian retainers, a menace and a terror to the neighboring English colonist. Saint-Castin, Du Lhut, La Durantaye, La Salle, La Motte-Cadillac, Iberville, Bienville, La Vérendrye, are names that stand conspicuous on the page of half-savage romance that refreshes the hard and practical annals of American colonization. But a more substantial debt is due to their memory. It was they, and such as they, who discovered the Ohio, explored the Mississippi to its mouth, discovered the Rocky Mountains, and founded Detroit, St. Louis, and New Orleans.

Even in his earliest day, the gentilhomme was not always in the evil plight where we have found him. There were a few exceptions to the general misery, and the chief among them is that of the Le Moynes of Montreal. Charles Le Moyne, son of an innkeeper of Dieppe and founder of a family the most truly eminent in Canada, was a man of sterling qualities who had been long enough in the colony to learn how to live there. [3] Others learned the same lesson at a later day, adapted themselves to soil and situation, took root, grew, and became more Canadian than French. As population increased, their seigniories began to yield appreciable returns, and their reserved domains became worth cultivating. A future dawned upon them; they saw in hope their names, their seigniorial estates, their manor-houses, their tenantry, passing to their children and their children’s children. The beggared noble of the early time became a sturdy country gentleman; poor, but not wretched; ignorant of books, except possibly a few scraps of rusty Latin picked up in a Jesuit school; hardy as the hardiest woodsman, yet never forgetting his quality of gentilhomme; scrupulously wearing its badge, the sword, and copying as well as he could the fashions of the court, which glowed on his vision across the sea in all the effulgence of Versailles, and beamed with reflected ray from the chateau of Quebec. He was at home among his tenants, at home among the Indians, and never more at home than when, a gun in his hand and a crucifix on his breast, he took the war-path with a crew of painted savages and Frenchmen almost as wild, and pounced like a lynx from the forest on some lonely farm or outlying hamlet of New England. How New England hated him, let her records tell. The reddest blood streaks on her old annals mark the track of the Canadian gentil-homme.

[3: Berthelot, proprietor of the comté of St. Laurent, and Robineau, of the barony of Portneuf, may also be mentioned as exceptionally prosperous. Of the younger Charles Le Moyne, afterwards Baron de Longueuil, Frontenac the governor says, “son fort et sa maison nous donnent une idée des chateaux de France fortifiez.” His fort was of Stone and flanked with four towers. It was nearly opposite Montreal, on the south shore.]

Chapter 16

The government of Canada was formed in its chief features after the government of a French province. Throughout France the past and the present stood side by side. The kingdom had a double administration; or rather, the shadow of the old administration and the substance of the new. The government of provinces had long been held by the high nobles, often kindred to the Crown; and hence, in former times, great perils had arisen, amounting during the civil wars to the danger of dismemberment. The high nobles were still governors of provinces; but here, as elsewhere, they had ceased to be dangerous. Titles, honors, and ceremonial they had in abundance; but they were deprived of real power. Close beside them was the royal intendant, an obscure figure, lost amid the vainglories of the feudal sunset, but in the name of the king holding the reins of government, a check and a spy on his gorgeous colleague. He was the king’s agent: of modest birth, springing from the legal class; owing his present to the king, and dependent on him for his future; learned in the law and trained to administration. It was by such instruments that the powerful centralization of the monarchy enforced itself throughout the kingdom, and, penetrating beneath the crust of old prescriptions, supplanted without seeming to supplant them. The courtier noble looked down in the pride of rank on the busy man in black at his side; but this man in black, with the troop of officials at his beck, controlled finance, the royal courts, public works, and all the administrative business of the province.

The governor-general and the intendant of Canada answered to those of a French province. The governor, excepting in the earliest period of the colony, was a military noble; in most cases bearing a title and sometimes of high rank. The intendant, as in France, was usually drawn from the gens de robe, or legal class. [4] The mutual relations of the two officers were modified by the circumstances about them. The governor was superior in rank to the intendant; he commanded the troops, conducted relations with foreign colonies and Indian tribes, and took precedence on all occasions of ceremony. Unlike a provincial governor in France, he had great and substantial power, The king and the minister, his sole masters, were a thousand leagues distant, and he controlled the whole military force. If he abused his position, there was no remedy but in appeal to the court, which alone could hold him in check. There were local governors at Montreal and Three Rivers; but their power was carefully curbed, and they were forbidden to fine or imprison any person without authority from Quebec. [5]

[4: The governor was styled in his commission, Gouverneur et Lieutenant-Général en Canada, Acadie, Isle de Terreneuve, et autres pays de la France Septentrionale; and the intendant, Intendant de la Justice, Police, et Finances in Canada, Acadie, Terreneuve, et autres pays de la France Septentrionale]

[5: The Sulpitian seigniors of Montreal claimed the right of appointing their own local governor. This was denied by the court, and the excellent Sulpitian governor, Maisonneuve, was removed by De Tracy, to die in patient obscurity at Paris. Some concessions were afterwards made in favor of the Sulpitian claims.]

The intendant was virtually a spy on the governor-general, of whose proceedings and of everything else that took place he was required to make report. Every year he wrote to the minister of state, one, two, three, or four letters, often forty or fifty pages long, filled with the secrets of the colony, political and personal, great and small, set forth with a minuteness often interesting, often instructive, and often excessively tedious. [6] The governor, too, wrote letters of pitiless length; and each of the colleagues was jealous of the letters of the other. In truth, their relations to each other were so critical, and perfect harmony so rare, that they might almost be described as natural enemies. The court, it is certain, did not desire their perfect accord; nor, on the other hand, did it wish them to quarrel: it aimed to keep them on such terms that, without deranging the machinery of administration, each should be a check on the other. [7]

[6: I have carefully read about two thousand pages of these letters.]

[7: The governor and intendant made frequent appeals to the court to settle questions arising between them. Several of these appeals are preserved. The king wrote replies on the margin of the paper, but they were usually too curt and general to satisfy either party.]

The governor, the intendant, and the supreme council or court, were absolute masters of Canada under the pleasure of the king. Legislative, judicial, and executive power, all centered in them. We have seen already the very unpromising beginnings of the supreme council. It had consisted at first of the governor, the bishop, and five councilors chosen by them. The intendant was soon added to form the ruling triumvirate; but the appointment of the councilors, the occasion of so many quarrels, was afterwards exercised by the king himself. [8] Even the name of the council underwent a change in the interest of his autocracy, and he commanded that it should no longer be called the Supreme but only the Superior Council. The same change had just been imposed on all the high tribunals of France. [9] Under the shadow of the fleur-de-lis, the king alone was to be supreme.

[8: Déclaration du Roi du 16me Juin, 1703. Appointments were made by the king many years earlier. As they were always made on the recommendation of the governor and intendant, the practical effect of the change was merely to exclude the bishop from a share in them. The West India Company made the nominations during the ten years of its ascendancy.]

[9: Cheruel, Administration Monarchique en France, II. 100.]

– The Old Regime In Canada, Chapter 16 by Francis Parkman

The below is from Francis Parkman’s Introduction.

If, at times, it may seem that range has been allowed to fancy, it is so in appearance only; since the minutest details of narrative or description rest on authentic documents or on personal observation.

Faithfulness to the truth of history involves far more than a research, however patient and scrupulous, into special facts. Such facts may be detailed with the most minute exactness, and yet the narrative, taken as a whole, may be unmeaning or untrue. The narrator must seek to imbue himself with the life and spirit of the time. He must study events in their bearings near and remote; in the character, habits, and manners of those who took part in them, he must himself be, as it were, a sharer or a spectator of the action he describes.

With respect to that special research which, if inadequate, is still in the most emphatic sense indispensable, it has been the writer’s aim to exhaust the existing material of every subject treated. While it would be folly to claim success in such an attempt, he has reason to hope that, so far at least as relates to the present volume, nothing of much importance has escaped him. With respect to the general preparation just alluded to, he has long been too fond of his theme to neglect any means within his reach of making his conception of it distinct and true.

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